Ballista Towers

[ivanbuto]

What precisely does this improvement do? In the Great Library it says it gives +20 attack against offensive units, but does that make any sense? I thought when a city is attacked the units inside will be either in defensive position or will be using ranged fire. Or do the units in the first row both attack and defend against each other at the same time?
Thanks,

Ivan

[Dale]

Battles are done like this:

1. Attacker attack vs Defender defense.
2. Defender attack vs Attacker defense.

Ballista towers help the odds for phase 2 of combat.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Dale
Battles are done like this:

1. Attacker attack vs Defender defense.
2. Defender attack vs Attacker defense.

Ballista towers help the odds for phase 2 of combat.

Are you sure? That would make defenders with poor attack stats pretty crap.

[Dale]

Not necessarily. If you look closely at the unit stats you should notice that generally attackers have good attack and poor defense, and defenders have good defense and poor attack. It evens out.

In the context of the question and the ballista tower, when the attacker swings his sword, he's the "attacking" unit. When the defender swings his sword, he's the "attacking" unit. It may sound confusing, but you just need to think of it in terms of combat rounds and who is swinging the sword and who is parrying. Make sense?

So a properly used defender can win against a properly used attacker. By using mixed stacks is how you gain the upper hand. A good mix of grunts-ranged-flankers will ALWAYS beat a poor mixed stack of the same era.

This is fundamentally the problem with the AI's combat engine. We haven't worked out a way to make the AI use effectively mixed stacks.

[Dauphin]

OK.

I haven't played CtP for ages, and that combat model seemed odd.

[ahenobarb]

Originally posted by Sagacious Dolphin
OK.

I haven't played CtP for ages, and that combat model seemed odd.

I like it much better than the Civ I-III model. Where attacker and defender were determined by who first moved to attack. That system ignores the tactics of battle.

Yes, a cavalray unit is better attacking than defending, but that is not determined by who attacked who first, the advantage is determined on the battle field by cavalry charges.

So a player in the CTP2 model does not think, "I should attack that cavalry unit this turn (when it only has its defense score) before he attacks me on the next in order to use his attack advantage." The player instead thinks, "I better have something to counter the abilities of the cavalry on the battle field."

It's a richer model. I still wish tactics were incorporated in greater detail into the game, but the CTP2 system provides an elegant solution.

[Maquiladora]

The only problem i have with the combat system is the way armour is too powerful and they totally threw out HP, or rather they gave all units 10hp.

A solution: Make all units armour rating 1, so it depends more on HP, which are increased depending on type of unit. ie. Most Tank units get 30hp, air units 20hp, sea units ranging from 30-60hp(super battleship) and grunts 10hp. And then give Air and Sea units generally more attack so this makes bombing by air and bombarding more important, as was intended.

Much like the old Civ2 way, except without attacker only attacks and defender only defends, which shouldve been out the door long ago anyway.

Youll be able to see an example of this in my scenario, coming soon to a thread near you.

edit: I should also say that Air and Sea units are incapable of capturing cities(obviously), so it doesnt make them too powerful.

[ahenobarb]

I agree Maquiladora. I also, think that unit size should be taken into account during the battles (perhaps it is to some degree (?) but not enough).

For instance one reason that Legions could easily beat hoplites is that hoplite armies were very small (Athens at its height could only field about 60,000 -- whereas its estimated that republican Rome could call up ~1 million [In Athens you had to bring your own equipment, in Rome they gave it to you]). So it should take 2 or 3 hoplites to match a legion. Same thing with knights and cavalry, Napoleon would have overwhelmed Henry V.

It would be nice if tech research allowed you to gain new tactics (like formation fighting or mass armies) that permitted an increase in your army size. And on top of that, the amount of increase should be dependant on your total population size. But ... it don't work dat way.

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by ahenobarb
It would be nice if tech research allowed you to gain new tactics (like formation fighting or mass armies) that permitted an increase in your army size. And on top of that, the amount of increase should be dependant on your total population size. But ... it don't work dat way.

You could actually, through slic, when a player goes over say 20 pop points (200,000 population) in their empire, give them the bigger version of the hoplite. UNIT_HOPLITE_KICKURARSE, which has an armour rating of 2 instead of the default hoplite 1.

And make the original UNIT_HOPLITE obsolete, perhaps even upgrading the exsiting hoplites to "kickurarse" hoplites at the same time the pop is triggered.

Just an idea.

[ahenobarb]

I'm showing my hand a little on a mod I'm working on. It's possible, but it will take some serious work.

[Maquiladora]

The way i described would make the bigger nations even more powerful, so an auto-upgrade might not be a good idea. Maybe only for the AI like cradle.

Unless you have something totally different in mind

[HuangShang]

sound to be getting a little RTS right?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by ahenobarb
It would be nice if tech research allowed you to gain new tactics (like formation fighting or mass armies) that permitted an increase in your army size. And on top of that, the amount of increase should be dependant on your total population size. But ... it don't work dat way.

You could use SLIC to control the max army size. Of course, you could never exceed 12, but you can easily enforce smaller stacks...